I love Disney. I own Disney stock, I have a Disney Visa. I've been to DisneyWorld at least 10 times and Disneyland once.

So it was with some trepidation that I picked up this thin volume. Hiaasen hates Disney with the passion that only a native Floridian can feel. He finds the dirt on Disney and Michael Eisner (the book was written in 1998), pulling no punches.

Not as wickedly written as I'd hoped and expected. Some compelling arguments and reasoning about why Disney has become the evil empire. It was nice to hear from someone who thinks that Disney's sanitized, purified, commercialized, revisionist take on the world is simply wrong. ( )

This is not a 2010 publication; it's an ebook release of a book from 1998. As I read this supposed 2010 book, I kept wondering why on earth Hiaasen didn't have any information from after 1995, so I went looking online, and of course, found the original release date. Wish my public library would stop buying older books that have been repackaged as "new" ebooks.

I love Carl Hiaasen; he's clever and raunchy and satiric, and a great storyteller. His adult novels skewer people who value money or power above everything else; his books for kids show the environmental impact of greed and mismanagement. I was hoping for a good look at how Disney's presence has changed Florida.

And in a limited way, that's what I got, but all the facts and figures are from the mid nineties, and so now nearly 20 years out of date! If you're looking for Hiaasen's wit, go read one of his novels. If you want information on corporate greed, look for a more up-to-date source. ( )

There's a great deal that's wrong with Disney, and Hiaasen's book is a good, quick, easily accessible introduction. From there, though, you should move on to more in-depth criticism. The most recent thing I've read that I would recommend would be Henry Giroux's The Mouse that Roared.( )

Wikipedia in English (1)

Let's get one thing straight: Carl Hiaasen doesn't like the Walt Disney Company. Whenever the giant entertainment conglomerate stumbles, as it did with its proposed Civil War theme park in Virginia, Hiaasen cheers. When a rhinoceros mysteriously dies at Disney's new theme park, Animal Kingdom, Hiaasen secretly hopes for the worst, because, as he writes, "no scandal is so delectable as a Disney scandal."

A native of Florida, author of such thrillers as Lucky You and Strip Tease, and a journalist for the Miami Herald, Hiaasen comes by his dislike for Disney honestly. He has witnessed the relentless success of the Disney machine firsthand with the development of Disney World and other properties around Orlando. In Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World, Hiaasen paints a witty and sarcastic portrait in this nonfiction account of a company who can control the press, manipulate local governments, and because it's Disney, get away with it. Team Rodent is a quick, entertaining read that even the most loyal Disney shareholder (except maybe Michael Eisner) will find enlightening and amusing. --Harry C. Edwards

(retrieved from Amazon Thu, 12 Mar 2015 18:19:45 -0400)

▾Library descriptions

"Disney is so good at being good that it manifests an evil; so uniformly efficient and courteous, so dependably clean and conscientious, so unfailingly entertaining that it's unreal, and therefore is an agent of pure wickedness. ... Disney isn't in the business of exploiting Nature so much as striving to improve upon it, constantly fine-tuning God's work."--from Team rodent.… (more)